Self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, driverless cars and robocars
Submitted by brad on Mon, 2013-08-05 13:38Our technology is having trouble with settling on a name. That's OK before it's mainstream but will eventually present a problem. When people in the field are polled on what name they like, there is no clear winner. Let's look at some of the commonly used candidates:
Driverless Cars
Recently, this has become the most common term used in the press. There is a "Driverless Car Summit" and the Wikipedia page has used that name for some time.
In spite of this popularity, the term is very rarely used by people actually building the vehicles. Attendees at the "Driverless Car Summit" when polled all said they dislike it. Until recently, the most common news story about a driverless car would say, "then the driverless car rolled down the hill and careened into the other lane, hitting a tree."
My personal view is that this term is like "horseless carriage." Long ago the most remarkable thing about the automobile was that it had no horse. Here it's the lack of driver (or at least lack of action by the driver.) Of course, these cars have something driving them, but it's a computer system. While this term is most popular, I am confident it will fade away and seem quaint, like horseless carriage did.
Alain Kornhauser has proposed that Driverless Car refer only to cars capable of fully-unmanned operation, and those that need an occasional human be called self-driving. As yet this has not caught on.
Self-driving cars
This term is popular among developers of the cars. Its main problem is that it's too long to be a popular term. The acronym SDC is a reasonable one. In web hits, this is tied with Driverless Cars, but falls behind that name in searches and news mentions.
Autonomous Vehicles
This term was most popular in the early years, though it is most commonly found in research environments and in the military sphere. In the military they also use "unmanned ground vehicle" -- another term too unwieldy for the public --though they usually refer to remote controlled vehicles, not self-driving ones.
Annoyingly, the acronym "AV" has another popular meaning today. Most of the terms here are too long to become common use terms, and so will be turned into acronyms or shortened, but this one has an acronym problem.
Automated Road Vehicle
This term has minor traction, almost entirely due to the efforts of Steve Shladover of UC Berkeley. In his view, the word autonomous is entirely misused here and the correct term is automated. Roboticists tend to differ -- they have been using "autonomous" to mean "not remote controlled" for many years. There are two meanings of autonomous in common use. One is to be independent of direct control (which these cars are) and the other one, "self-governing" is the one Steve has the issue with. As a member of the program committee for TRB's conference on the area, he has pushed the "automated" name and given it some traction.
Unfortunately, to roboticists, "automated" is how you describe a dishwasher or a pick-and-place robot; it's a lower level of capability. I don't expect this terminology to gain traction among them.
Highly Automated Vehicle (HAV) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS)
For some time, HAV was the term used in NHTSA proposed regulations. It never caught on. The new regulations use ADS, it is unclear if this will catch on -- the acronym of course is an English word so it can't easily be searched for.
Robocars
I selected this term for these pages for a variety of reasons. It was already in modest use thanks to a Science Channel documentary on the DARPA challenge called "robocars."
- Talking to teams, they usually just called their vehicle "the robot" or "the car."
- It is short, easy to say, and clear about what it means
- It is distinct and thus can easily be found in online searches
- It had some amount of existing use, notably as the title of a documentary on the Science Channel about the DARPA challenges
However, it is doing poorly in popularity and only has about 21,000 web pages using it, so I may need to switch away from it as well if a better term appears. Today it reminds people too much of robotics, and the trend is to move away from that association.
On the other hand, no other term satisfies the criteria above, which I think are very good criteria.